Compromise

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHY DO I ALWAYS COMPROMISE? One compromises because one is not certain about one's truth, one is not certain about one's own experience. The moment you have experienced something, it is impossible to compromise. There is no possibility at all. You compromise only because your idea is only a mind thing, a borrowed thought. You don't know whether it is right or wrong, so even if half proves to be right, it is not a bad bargain. There is an ancient story in Egypt. Two women came to the court of the king with a small child. They contended -- both of them -- that, "The child belongs to me, he is my child." And each woman was persistent -- "The child is mine." The king had to decide, and it was very difficult -- how to decide?

Beloved Osho, hearing you talk about your rebellious attitude in your childhood, I feel connected to that, because I did the same. I struggled hard not to be repressed, but somehow they got me in the end. Half-heartedly I compromised. Why was your rebellion not disturbed by anything?

Neither I compromise with anybody, nor do I allow anybody else to compromise with me. I have never compromised and I have never allowed anybody to compromise with me. Compromise is not my game. This is possible only if you are not trying to strengthen your ego. For ego, it makes no difference: struggle is okay if it is nourishment for the ego, compromise is okay if it is nourishment for the ego. The ego wants to remain -- it can use any means. There is no question of deciding what is right, what is wrong. For the ego, anything that keeps it strong is right -- might is right. So if you can get something through compromise, why should you bother to fight? Yes, if you cannot get it through compromise, you are ready to struggle, to fight, to do anything that you are capable of. This must have…

Osho, you have said that causeless, unmotivated action—nishkama karma—is the source of joy. But surely in life there are things that do require motivation—industrial, mechanical work, and so on. So please tell us how to balance motivated action with unmotivated action in life?

Look at Mahavira—one of the rarest intelligences to walk the earth—yet he found little following in the world. The sole reason: a single “mistake”—he did not speak the language of the naive. Mahavira said, “This is right—and that also is right.” His view is called syadvada. He says, “Everything has its truth; even a lie cannot be such that nothing in it is true. This is right; the opposite too is right; and opposite to both is also right.” The listeners said, “Excuse us then—we will go find someone who says ‘This is right.’ Either you don’t know, or you know something unusable for us.” It’s been twenty-five hundred years since Mahavira. In India, even today, those who “follow” him scarcely exceed three million. If twenty-five people per year had truly been initiated by Mahavira, their descendants would be more! What happened? And of those three million, hardly three truly…

Beloved Osho, you have always been an inspiration to me. You give me the courage to continue to do my thing and not compromise in my work, even though I feel like an outcast almost everywhere I go. I need you to say it is okay for me to keep on being a misfit.

And to be a misfit does not mean to be an egoist. If you are an egoist, sooner or later you will compromise. When you find any group of people, any society, any country, which helps you to be more egoistic, you will immediately fit with that society. The real misfit is a humble man. That's why nobody can absorb him. He is free because he is free of the ego. Now these "dirty dozen".... And Santa Fe seems to be something special. Nobody had heard about it before. Why have these camels reached Santa Fe? Just because they are camels. Santa Fe at its entrance has a rock formation of a camel. They print postcards of that camel -- somebody sent me one. Then I came to know why these camels are going to Santa Fe -- Santa Fe is meant for camels. But they don't know... now that…